Obscuritads

• 2011-07-13

  

  explodingdog:

  prepared for rain

  Source: explodingdog

• 2011-07-12

  The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer

  I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my
  inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission
  to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it.
  I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts,
  and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing,
  and reaped, as I knew, by luck and Heaven's favor,
  in spite of the best advice. If I have been caught
  so often laughing at funerals, that was because
  I knew the dead were already slipping away,
  preparing a comeback, and can I help it?
  And if at weddings I have gritted and gnashed
  my teeth, it was because I knew where the bridegroom
  had sunk his manhood, and knew it would not
  be resurrected by a piece of cake. ‘Dance,’ they told me,
  and I stood still, and while they stood
  quiet in line at the gate of the Kingdom, I danced.
  ‘Pray,’ they said, and I laughed, covering myself
  in the earth's brightnesses, and then stole off gray
  into the midst of a revel, and prayed like an orphan.
  When they said, ‘I know my Redeemer liveth,’
  I told them, ‘He's dead.’ And when they told me
  ‘God is dead,’ I answered, ‘He goes fishing ever day
  in the Kentucky River. I see Him often.’
  When they asked me would I like to contribute
  I said no, and when they had collected
  more than they needed, I gave them as much as I had.
  When they asked me to join them I wouldn't,
  and then went off by myself and did more
  than they would have asked. ‘Well, then,’ they said
  ‘go and organize the International Brotherhood 
  of Contraries,’ and I said, ‘Did you finish killing
  everybody who was against peace?’ So be it.
  Going against men, I have heard at times a deep harmony
  thrumming in the mixture, and when they ask me what
  I say I don't know. It is not the only or the easiest
  way to come to the truth. It is one way.
  
  Wendell Berry

• 2011-07-10

  I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.

  — Neil Gaiman, via Rob (via lukescommonplacebook)

  Source: lukescommonplacebook

• 2011-05-22

  

  “What mad Nijinsky wrote
  About Diaghilev
  Is true of the normal heart;
  For the error bred in the bone
  Of each woman and each man
  Craves what it cannot have,
  Not universal love
  But to be loved alone.”

  WH Auden, September 1, 1939

  Image: Nijinsky in Scheherazade

• 2011-05-21

  

  “This scene is not staged for us, it is not laid out for our attention or the intention of a subject. Everything happens in an indifference to the visitor, and it even seems that it ought to remain hidden from whoever is not, already, one of a familiar circle. No one looks at us or invites us in.”

  “On The Threshold,” Jean-Luc Nancy, on The Death of the Virgin, Caravaggio, 1606

• 2011-05-16

  

  Today’s class notes. Thanks, Luke.

• 2011-05-15

  

  i will give you three guesses what this is an example of.

• 2011-04-29

  The fishermen, those whom Jesus first drew to his net, they were the most blasphemous and bitter.

  Theirs was a naked, pessimistic life, crushed with the dirty spume of beaches. They were a sect which had evolved its own signs, a vocation which excluded the stranger. The separation of town from countryside and countryside from sea challenged your safety, and all one’s yearning was to enter that life without living it. It smelled strong and true. But what was its truth?

  — Derek Walcott, Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays

• 2011-04-26

  Luke's Commonplace Book: "I Have News for You" - Tony Hoagland

  lukescommonplacebook:

  There are people who do not see a broken playground swing as a symbol of ruined childhood

  and there are people who don’t interpret the behavior of a fly in a motel room as a mocking representation of their thought process.

  There are people who don’t walk past an empty swimming pool and think…

  Source: lukescommonplacebook

• →

  Without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle, the theater is not possible. In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.

  — Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double